Valve’s Pipeline: What is it, and what will it do?

Valve Pipeline is providing teens with information on becoming a game developer

Valve has expanded itself into so many different things, game development, game marketing, and sales that it is almost impossible to keep up with all of their endeavors. However, their latest experiment called Pipeline is garnering quite a bit of attention.

Pipeline is a new program meant to help older kids in high-school figure how to get into the field of video game development. The website for the service is run completely by teenage interns and will focus-at least in the beginning-on providing answers to all sorts of questions pertaining to video game development and careers within the video game field.

Right now there are only a few questions and answers on the official Pipeline site but there will be many more coming in the near future according to the Intro video (see below.) As to why Valve is doing all of this, they said:

There are two main reasons that Valve is creating Pipeline. The first is that we are frequently asked questions by teenagers about the videogame industry. “What is it like to work on videogames? What should I study? What colleges are best for preparing me? How do I get a job in videogames?” Pipeline will be a place where those questions can be discussed. The second is that Valve is running an experiment…Pipeline is an experiment to see if we can take a group of high school students with minimal work experience and train them in the skills and methods necessary to be successful at a company like Valve.

In a way, Valve is simply working to create more people that would be able to hire and use for their game development. Since there is a shortage of experienced game developers-especially in the US-Valve feels that helping more teenagers get into the field will be beneficial for everyone. Even though there is nothing to suggest that Valve is getting anything out of this project, if there are more game developers then there will likely be more games that Valve can make and more games that they can also sell on Steam.